Consistency beats creativity
The unfortunate hard to swallow truth pill
Let’s start Monday with a classic:
A man walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a glass of water. The bartender pulls a shotgun and aims it at the man. The man says “Thank you” and leaves. What happened?
Answer, at the end. If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please obsessively forward this to people and tell them to:
You don’t find good ideas, they find you.
This is one of my favorite articles ever. Despite being a “leadership thought piece” (died a little inside just typing that out) it has a ton of valuable insights, resources and takes a sideways look at things most people take for granted.
To summarize, you’d be surprised how many things you can achieve without a goal.
How not having an objective can actually help you grow more and be more focused.
It’s counterintuitive and works against the advice of $500/hour coaches. But that’s because people don’t pay for counterintuitive advice, they pay to reinforce their own ideas (and boy, do good coaches know that).
If you decide to simply put yourself in a productive environment for ideas (meaning meeting new people from different backgrounds, working on projects you’re not familiar with, engaging on topics you’re not comfortable with) and do that consistently for long enough, you’ll be surprised how everything around you changes for the better.
Sometimes, having a goal helps. Other times, it freezes you up because you’re not seeing clear progress.
The best creative people I know will sometimes give advice that’s useless (“I don’t know, I’m just winging it”), but that’s because goal setting and strict environments simply don’t work for them.
As generic as it sounds, if you feel you’re struggling, try dropping your goals temporarily instead of obsessing over them.
The most important thing is being consistently present in a productive environment.
A question for you:
Now that we’re getting pretty consistent with this newsletter, it’s time to define its form a bit better. I want to be able to make time for it, but for that I need your help.
If I’m going to write it daily, I need to keep it short and crisp. If I’m going to make it longer, I need to reduce frequency so I have time to research subjects.
What would you prefer to see in your inbox?
1. A quick thought (like this email, maybe even shorter), 5x/week VOTE
2. Bit longer form, 3x/week VOTE
3. Even longer form, 1/week VOTE
It really helps me out if you take the time to vote. Thank you!
Answer: The man had the hiccups. The bartender scared him and cured him.
I came back to this article/newsletter after opening another great newsletter, from Dense Discovery. I think the opening quote from today fits quite nicely with your idea:
"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey."
– Wendell Berry